I have rope

[gracedpalmer]

Nylon twist, dyed with about a breadbag full of yellow onion skins in a large aluminum stockpot. About a cup of white vinegar was used to make the dye set - nylon dyes like wool.



So, now I have lots of soft pretty rope. I just need a victim to help try it out. ;)

Must do more natural dyeing!

Comments

[adsartha.livejournal.com]

Is that to say this would be good to use on wool as well? I have some white corriedale that I'd like to knit up into slippers, but white will rapidly become not!white in anything that's being walked on daily. So.

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

Onions dye wool a very similar color. Just be careful not to get your wool really hot and then put it in cold water, cause it'll felt. Agitating wool in the pot will also felt it. Stir gently, and make sure there's plenty of space in the pot.
A different pot material will dye slightly different colors - no mordant (glass or steel pot) will be beige. Iron will be greyish brown. Copper will be brighter orange-yellow and tin is, I believe very bright (if for some reason you have a tin pot, which seems unlikely).
Turmeric does a brighter yellow that fades quickly. Red cabbage can do a nice pinkish color. Red onions are orangey or purplish, but much like yellow ones. Natural dyeing always comes out a little different, but it's fun!

[adsartha.livejournal.com]

Nono, felting is bad. I would be trying this under supervision of a more experience dyer anyway.

I have no tin. I do not know anyone offhand who has tin.

Yay! I will use google in a bit, here. Maybe wait until I can nag my not-quite-sister tomorrow morning.

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

Well, you could also mordant properly (cook the fiber in a solution of the appropriate metal salts), then dye. I'm just half-assed about everything, so I prefer to do it in a convenient pot. Hey, it's period! And I don't have to worry about snorting metal salts.

[adsartha.livejournal.com]

Hah! One of the things I'm learning from knitting is that sometimes, half-assed is totally okay. Though I want to borrow Em's brain AND her dye pot, which is reserved for these purposes. Then I don't have to go find an appropriate dye pot or angst about which of my cooking pots to give up.

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

Well, the nice thing about onionskin is that it's totally foodsafe. Only things that went in the pot were onions, vinegar and rope. Walnuts are foodsafe, too.
Logwood, not so much.

[adsartha.livejournal.com]

This is a fair point. I'm just used to Em always using weird chemicals and things (I know at the beginning of her dying journey, she was using Kool-Aid. Sigh.)

Anyway. Yes! Saving onion skins for awhile.

(Aren't you supposed to be packing?)

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

A google for onionskin dyeing will get you plenty of recipes.

[newperspectives.livejournal.com]

So wait, was the vinegar in the dye pot or in a rinse after?

I started collecting onionskins a bit ago, but I don't go through many onions, so it may be a while...
I'm really looking forward to next walnut season. We should have us a dye marathon!

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

The vinegar was in the pot. It also took surprisingly few onion skins, but we use em up here. What I did, in more detail, was simmer the skins in the big aluminum pot for a couple of hours, then skim them out. I put a big glug of vinegar in (2/3-1 cup?), then put my washed, damp rope in. I then simmered that until the color stopped changing, rinsed it in the sink, and laid it out on the radiator.

I've got the rest of the dye liquor in a 2 liter by the stove, and I re-cooked the remaining skins last night to see if I could get an exhaust bath. I also still have enough onion skins to do another batch and some walnuts left, if you wanted to have a Science! fest.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's a really pretty color! And shiny!

[megalotta.livejournal.com]

by victem, do you mean me?